"When C.E. Falk won the Hampton Heat Late Model 200 at Langley Speedway a year ago, he likened the victory to finally hooking his Moby Dick. Some observers, however, considered crew chief Phil Warren, a Langley icon who won a record seven track titles as a driver, to be captain of that ship and Falk a young driver fortunate to ride his coat tails."
If he hooked his Moby Dick, wouldn't the analogy also entail him blowing up in a huge racetrack explosion while taking out every other driver but one?
The allusion today focuses on a one-dimensional obsession. My Moby Dick was reading and finishing Moby Dick when I had been trying to and lying about it for 25 years. I guess I should have burned in a conflagration of flames while torching the novel--that would have been poetic. But the allusion as it is used today does not necessarily mean the destruction of the pursuer.
Everyone must have a Moby Dick now. I think the difference is that for some of us, like Falk and myself, Moby Dick is a pinnacle to achieve something you've always been reaching for. For fictional characters Khan and Picard in the Star Trek movies, it did destroy the first and almost destroyed the latter (ST II: TWOK and ST: First Contact respectively).
I must fully analyze the Moby Dick references in those Star Trek movies now...
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